Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-Australian writer, journalist and broadcaster
Elif Shafak on divisive language
This week, 7 January 2025 marks exactly ten years since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when Islamist gunmen stormed the satirical magazine’s Paris editorial office and killed 11 people over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. A month after the attack, the Turkish writer Elif Shafak wrote for us on the increasingly divisive world in which we live, and the urgent need to differentiate between the right to be offended and the right to commit violence. Ten years on, with the proliferation of fractious rhetoric on social media, her words seem more poignant than ever. To mark the anniversary of the tragedy, we have republished Shafak’s piece below. It was originally published online on 12 March 2015, and in print in Volume 44, Issue 1 of Index on Censorship. Charlie Hebdo has also produced a special edition to mark ten years, which you can read more about here.
After the horrific attacks against the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the world has turned into a Tower of Babel where there are too many languages spoken but too little, if any, real communication. Ever since those three days of terror in France, across the globe there has been more anger than sorrow, more emotional backlash than rational analysis, and more confusion than insight.
As heartwarming as it was to see millions of Parisians march against religious extremism and countless others show their solidarity via hashtags and messages on social media, we cannot ignore the fact that a rather disturbing cognitive gap is opening up between different parts of the world and different segments of humanity. Even in the face of atrocity, humankind is failing to speak the same language.
Among the political leaders who marched in Paris there were quite a few with a lamentable human rights curriculum vitae. While Saudi Arabia was quick to send a representative to France, the regime did not shy away from publicly lashing Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger, for his views. Israel, Russia and Egypt, among others, have been criticised for their double standards at home and abroad. Turkey, my motherland, has a shocking number of journalists and cartoonists either in prison or facing trial.
No doubt, the most moving response to the act of brutality came from cartoonists across the globe. With powerful images and few words they showed their unflinching support for freedom of expression. But those of us who cannot draw, and therefore must talk or write have done a poor job in general. With every aggrandising remark the cognitive gap widened.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed: “This is a war declared on civilization.” Soon after, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced: “French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay a price.” He then added: “Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.” Such statements only served to increase conspiracy theories, which abound throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile journalists, academics and writers lampooned each other. The response to a book is another book.
So far, the language over Charlie Hebdo has been more divisive than unifying. Even the usage of conjunctions is a problem. After the tragedy, a top-level politician in Turkey tweeted that it was wrong to kill journalists, but they should not have mocked Islamic values. Never had the word “but” disturbed me so much.
The controversy had important echoes inside Turkey. The secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet wrote a powerful statement, saying that having lost some of their own writers to terrorism in the past, they understood so well the pain of the Charlie Hebdo killings. But the AKP government was of a different mind. The prime minister said printing the cartoons would be considered “heavy sedition” and they would not allow anyone to insult the Prophet. Accordingly, a court order was issued to prohibit access to Turkish websites that insisted in publishing Charlie Hebdo’s recent cover.
In response, independent news website T24 openly defied the court ban and published the entire issue of the magazine. And people kept spreading the cover via their Twitter and Facebook accounts. It was interesting to see how many of these reactions came from people who were already tired of the AKP government’s restrictive attitudes towards freedom of speech. As always, Turkey’s social media operated as a political platform. Over the years as media freedoms shrunk visibly, the social media became more and more politicised.
Every journalist, every poet, every novelist in Turkey knows words carry a heavy weight, and they can get you in trouble. We know that only too well that because of a poem, an article, a novel, or even a tweet we can be sued, put on trial, demonised, even imprisoned. When we write, we write with this knowledge at the back of our minds. As a result there is a lot of silent self-censorship. Yet we find it rather difficult to talk about this subject, mostly because it is embarrassing.
As a Turkish writer both freedom of speech and freedom of imagination are precious to me. When I travel in Muslim-majority countries I often hear people saying “I am offended, don’t I have a right to be?” Yet I believe we are making a grave mistake by focusing on the word “offence”, and questioning whether art can be offensive or people have a right to be offended. We are stuck in a mental trap as long as we cannot manage to discuss violence and offence separately.
We need to divorce the two notions. It is perfectly human to be offended in the face of mockery, opprobrium or slander. That is understandable. Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Christians or agnostics, we can all feel offended by something someone says, writes or does. But that is where the line must be drawn. What is inhuman and unacceptable is to resort to violence and shed blood in response.
The response to a book is another book. The response to an article is writing a counter-article. The response to cartoons is more cartoons, not fewer. Words need to be answered with words. This simple equation is what we have failed to teach to both the younger generations and ourselves.
Let’s be clear: this is not a clash of civilizations. It is not even a battle of religions. Yet it is a clash, and a deepening one, between two mindsets. The real chasm is between those of us who believe in pluralistic democracy, culture of co-existence and the value of diversity and cosmopolitanism, and those who have chosen to divide humanity into mutually exclusive camps: us versus them. It is a cognitive clash therefore.
As Sufis have been saying throughout the centuries, we are all profoundly interconnected. Globalism has way too often been interpreted as an economic and political phenomenon. Yet it also means that our futures, our stories and our destinies are interconnected. The unhappiness of someone living in Pakistan affects the happiness of someone living in Belgium or Australia. We must understand that in this complex web of relations any divisive rhetoric is bound to create more of the same.
Extremism somewhere breeds extremism elsewhere. Islamophobia spawns anti-Westernism and anti-Westernism spawns Islamophobia. A far-right racist in Germany might regard a Taliban man in Pakistan as his arch-enemy but in fact, they are kindred spirits. They share surprisingly similar narrow mindsets. And what’s more, they need each other to exist and to thrive.
We need to get out of the vicious circle of division and hatred before it engulfs us all. Together we must stand and speak up for pluralistic democracy and harmonious coexistence. At the same time, however, now is the time to think about the response we have given to the tragedy calmly and carefully. In this response lie the hidden important clues to our strengths and weaknesses as fellow human beings and the sharpest dilemmas that will continue to beset the world in the 21st century.
Can academic freedom survive Donald Trump’s plans for thought control?
In the name of “free speech”, Donald Trump has laid out an authoritarian plan for his new administration to radically defund and gag universities. Now with a Republican Congress, he might just achieve it all and that spells disaster for freedom of thought, critical inquiry and an informed citizenry in the USA.
Trump’s plan is based on the education chapter within the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s 900-page political roadmap Project 2025, a set of policy proposals that lay out a long-term ultra conservative vision. The chapter is written by Lindsey Burke, director of the organisation’s Center for Education for Policy.
First on the list is dismantling the Department of Education, a realistic threat now Republicans have both the House and Senate. Trump has put a wrestling magnate in charge of the department, Linda McMahon. She was formerly head of the US Small Business Administration and is currently chair of the America First Policy Institute, McMahon financed Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden with its notoriously bigoted speakers, according to Forbes. She will play a key role in rolling out plans that will profoundly shift power to reinforce historical social inequities in universities. These could include reversing protections for the LGBTQ+ community, privatising student loans and halting loan forgiveness.
Trump’s radical overhaul includes defunding universities that he considers to be “turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathisers of many, many different dimensions” by taxing, fining and suing private university endowments (funds or assets donated to universities to provide long-term financial support).
Trump sees Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes that such schools have engaged in as “unlawful discrimination” and he is seeking “restitution” through the law. He plans to “pursue federal civil rights cases” and increase the tax against these schools. During his first presidency, Trump signed a new plan that introduced a 1.4% on endowments of private universities with at least 500 students and $100,000 or more in assets for every full-time student.
America’s most prestigious universities, such as Harvard (which rely greatly on federal funds) will be prime targets. Following a wave of pro-Palestine protests – which were already subdued with arrests and brutality – there was conservative backlash. This prepared the ground for the coming lawfare aimed at punishing higher education institutions for wrong-think. For example, according to The Guardian, Steve Scalise, House majority leader, has discussed plans to punish universities that allow pro-Palestine protests by revoking their accreditation.
With the spoils raised by stripping these educational institutions, Trump will fund a new American Academy. While he describes it as “non-political”, Trump’s ideological agenda is clear: “no wokeness or jihadism allowed”. Trump explains that American Academy will “gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free”.
In what sounds troublingly like generative AI driven education, delivery of “content” will be through “study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing”. There is no mention of professors or teachers.
There is little detail on the curriculum – so what kind of “content” will be considered “human knowledge” worth teaching? Trump’s scientific beliefs raise concerns. For example, he has previously said: “One of the most urgent tasks, not only for our movement, but for our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.”
The role of “industry partners” is left vague but we should be asking whether companies delivering content through “breakthrough” technology could gain access to students’ behavioral data for training AI. Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook chair in media, ethics and communications at McGill University, forewarns of the dismantling of recent AI oversight efforts and an incoming merger of tech and state power where “the interests of select technology companies become indistinguishable from US government policy”.
With Elon Musk leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), my fear is that we could see emerging education policy influenced by the view that AI is a neutral tool for “free speech”, which can replace “unnecessary” educators.
Trump’s own past forays into the education sector don’t inspire confidence in his motives. In 2004, he set up “Trump University” as a for-profit initiative and real estate training programme, which claimed to share the secrets to being a successful entrepreneur. It faced several lawsuits, including allegations that Trump University defrauded its students through misleading marketing practices and aggressive sales tactics. Despite the organisation never admitting wrongdoing, Trump settled the lawsuits, paying 6,000 defrauded victims a $25 million settlement in 2016 shortly after being elected president.
American Academy appears to be designed to extract power from the academe and weaken education, rather than strengthen it. It will compete with universities while its free online courses will be “equivalent” to a bachelor’s degree, accredited, and recognised for federal employment – which will itself further degrade government by hollowing out expertise.
Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Trump has said he will use executive orders to rescind or rewrite regulations, which could be used to undo stronger Biden-era Title IX protections against sexual harassment in universities and colleges. Executive orders are a powerful presidential tool enabling swift changes to federal policies and priorities without the approval of Congress – but they also have the potential for abuse of power. All this accompanies recent efforts to casualise the employment of professors, and weaken the tenure system, which ensures they cannot be removed easily and protects unpopular research, teaching and speech.
As university endowments are purged and their federal resources become contingent on pleasing ideological gatekeepers, it is hard to imagine brave or rigorous research can survive in the hollowed-out husks that remain. Once universities begin losing students to AI-delivered “free degrees” this will of course accelerate the roll-out of EdTech across the sector, resulting in declining educational standards and heightened surveillance in the name of “efficiency”. And should dissenters rise up, student protests will be stifled or exploited to legitimate further attacks on their institutions.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, recently stated that the country “is in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.
This “revolution” is not without casualties, however: many of America’s more privileged intellectuals will flee this war to financial stability or intellectual freedom overseas, but minority, dissident and refugee academics will be most vulnerable to harassment, insecurity and displacement. It will polarise inequality in an existing two-tier education system: community colleges and non-elite universities won’t survive.
Universities specialising in specific subjects, such as disinformation, will also continue to be uniquely targeted. In 2022 Trump threatened that “within hours” of his inauguration, he would sign an executive order “banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information’.
The 2024 Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court ruling may disrupt these plans somewhat, as it reaffirmed that technology researchers are independent and have First Amendment rights to carry out their work, and communicate it with the public, companies and the government. Yet, while some rights can be defended in the courts, legal battles take time, and great damage can be done in the meantime. Technology and disinformation researchers continue to face relentless political pressure, harassment, obstruction and lawfare.
The USA was once considered one of the world’s strongest defenders of academic freedom and free expression. While this was always a romanticised perception in an unequal system, Trumpism over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in US academic freedom. Attacks on US higher education have already begun, and the USA has fallen below more than 70 other countries in the Academic Freedom Index Update. Universities are pre-emptively ditching inclusivity practices in anticipation of Trump’s policies – but they must not “obey in advance”, as historian Timothy Snyder would say.
Scholars, students, journalists, businesses and civil society must be united to defend against and communicate this threat to ordinary Americans. Given that the changes could also result in a long-term decline in the US economy, business leaders and economists should condemn these regressive plans. US academia must mobilise itself within and between sectors to defend academic freedom issues, and communicate the importance of human interaction and interpersonal communication in education.
The conservatives’ success here spells disaster for the world. Successful authoritarian capture of academia in such a powerful liberal democracy could inspire right-wing political attacks on education globally. The American moral panic over “critical race theory”, for example, became a political weapon that destabilised education policy development in Australia, and we have also seen the authoritarian takeover of education in Hungary. As Trump’s changes unfurl, the UN and its member states must take the lead in condemning measures which unpick the education system and threaten free expression globally. More broadly, we need an international movement of those who embrace low-tech alternatives and who are willing to disrupt “the machine” in sectors where lives, jobs and critical human knowledge are threatened by technofascism.
Be nice, or you’re not coming in
This article was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of Index on Censorship. We are republishing it here after Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of making a “horrific mistake” in violating Canadian sovereignty at an inquiry into the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Last June, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh activist campaigning for Khalistan, a separate homeland for his co-religionists, was shot dead in British Columbia, Canada.
The murder happened in a car park, and a video emerged of his body collapsed over the steering wheel. Three months later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government was involved in the murder. India reacted angrily, terming Trudeau’s charge “absurd”. India removed diplomats from Canada, asked Canada to reduce its diplomatic presence in India, and significantly delayed Canadian visa applications. The USA, Canada’s closest ally, expressed concern but did not say more.
In recent years, India’s strategic importance has increased for three reasons: its growing economy, its outwardly democratic credentials and its potential emergence as the counterweight to China – not only in Asia but on the international stage.
Western governments have been queuing up to invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit their countries and rolling out the red carpet for him, or they’ve been visiting India and announcing investment deals – even if actual inflows may be puny compared with the bombastic claims.
Sikhs and India
Sikhs form about 2% of India’s population, and most of them live in the fertile and prosperous state of Punjab along with Hindus, Muslims and others. In the early-1970s, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a political party representing Sikh and Punjabi interests, passed a resolution seeking greater autonomy. By the late 1970s, a militant movement emerged, seeking an independent homeland called Khalistan, carved out of India.
Extremists representing Khalistani interests attacked government targets and terrorised civilians. Many militants garrisoned themselves in the holiest Sikh shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and in June 1984 then prime minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into the temple to eliminate the threat.
Hundreds died in what became known as Operation Bluestar. Four months later, on 31 October, Gandhi was assassinated by two of her bodyguards – both Sikh. In the retaliatory violence that followed, thousands of Sikhs were killed in northern India.
Indian security forces pursued the militants ruthlessly, and the Khalistan movement subsided. It survives among Sikhs abroad who dream of an independent Sikh nation, but in India there is little support for Sikh separatism.
However, Sikhs overseas and in India remember the attack on the Golden Temple, the pogrom of Sikhs in 1984 and the lack of justice. While Indian leaders have since expressed regret over the violence, and a Sikh economist – Manmohan Singh – was India’s prime minister from 2004 until 2014, the wounds have not healed. That accounts for the nostalgic longing for an independent homeland among some Sikhs abroad.
Nijjar’s killing would have remained largely forgotten, but in November the USA charged an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, with attempting to hire an assassin to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader who is the general counsel for Sikhs for Justice and who lives in the USA. Gupta, the USA alleged, was acting under the directions of an Indian government official and had offered $100,000 to a potential assassin.
He did not know that the man he was trying to hire was, in fact, a US agent, and Gupta is now in a Czech jail, awaiting extradition to the USA.
While the Indian government denied any role, its response to the US charge was more muted and less full of bluster than its response to Trudeau. US President Joe Biden was invited as the guest of honour to India’s day of pomp and glory – the Republic Day parade – in January this year. Biden did not make the trip and while he did not give any specific reason, diplomatic circles believe it was meant as a snub to India, which has elections later this year. The incumbent Modi would have loved the footage of Biden by his side, watching the might of India’s defence forces marching by.
There is no evidence of India’s role in either Nijjar’s murder or the plot against Pannun, and they could just as easily have been rogue operations. But the US charge-sheet is fairly detailed, and India’s subdued response raises questions. India’s current government has long admired the long reach of Israel’s Mossad, which has a record of carrying out spectacular attacks against those Israel considers its enemies.
Could some Indian officials have been tempted to imitate Israel as a form of flattery?
Transnational repression
Carrying out violent acts against individuals or organisations that a government considers hostile to its interests in a friendly country is an extreme form of transnational repression. But India has practised many other subtler forms of preventing contact between Indian dissidents seeking a global platform and foreign researchers or journalists wishing to report on India. It has expelled journalists, prevented academics from entering the country, stopped its own journalists or human rights activists from travel and got Indian embassies to complain loudly against foreign reporting of India.
Most recently, Vanessa Dougnac, who had been the longest-staying foreign correspondent in India, said she would leave the country after India revoked her status as an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI). (She is married to an Indian national, and so qualifies for such a status.) The title is misleading: OCI does not grant any citizenship rights such as the right to vote, but it grants the individual a permanent, long-stay visa and the ability to work (except in certain sectors). Dougnac was told her reporting for various French publications created a “biased, negative” perception of India. She wrote a heartfelt lament while leaving the country she considers her own, saying the government’s onerous conditions made it impossible for her to work there.
Earlier, the overseas citizenship of Ashok Swain, who teaches peace and conflict studies at Uppsala University in Sweden, was revoked. In November 2020, Swain was informed his OCI would be revoked because of his “inflammatory speeches” and “anti-India activities”. Swain asked for specific instances and requested for the decision to be overturned so he could visit his unwell mother back in India. His request was denied.
Swain sued the government, and in July 2023 the court ruled in his favour, saying the government needed to provide proper reasons. Later that month, the Indian embassy in Stockholm sent him another note, long on rhetoric and short on specifics, saying he was “hurting religious sentiments”, “destabilising” India’s social fabric and “spreading hate propaganda”. Swain was tweeting too much and too critically about India, the order said, hurting the country’s image abroad. Swain’s case will be heard in May.
The OCI status was created not as a right but as a privilege or an entitlement, because people of Indian origin who lived abroad had been clamouring for dual nationality, which Indian laws don’t permit. It was created in 2005 under the 1955 Citizenship Act, which allows foreign citizens of Indian origin or foreigners married to Indian citizens to enter the country without a visa and reside, work and hold property there, among other benefits.
But lately the government is wary of OCI journalists and academics visiting or living in the country, especially if the government does not like their reporting or investigations. In March 2021, India required OCIs to seek a permit to conduct research, for mountaineering, for missionary, journalistic or Tablighi (a Muslim sect) activities, or to visit any area of India deemed as “protected”.
According to the human rights and law-focused web portal Article 14, which has examined the issue in great detail, more than 4.5 million people around the world are OCIs, and data released by the government in response to an inquiry under India’s Right to Information Act, showed that the Modi administration had cancelled at least 102 OCI cards between 2014 and May 2023. In theory, those whose OCIs are cancelled can apply for a regular visa to visit India, but the government reserves the right to blacklist them which would, in effect, bar them forever from entering the country.
In November 2022, 82-year-old UK-based activist Amrit Wilson received a letter that tore to shreds her official ties with India. The letter, from the Indian high commission, blamed her for “anti-India activities” and for making “detrimental propaganda” which was “inimical” to India’s sovereignty and integrity. There was, of course, no evidence – but she was asked to provide reasons within a fortnight why her status should not be revoked. Wilson sent a detailed response, but several months later the government replied that her response wasn’t “plausible”, and cancelled her status. She is now appealing through the Indian court system. In its response, the government pointed out some of her tweets for being critical of the government and an article that opposed the revoking of the special status granted to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The government claims it can cancel the status of those who have shown “disaffection to the constitution” or “assisted an enemy during war”, or done anything that it believes is against the interests of “sovereignty, integrity and security” of India.
Chetan Ahimsa (Kumar), a leading actor in Kannada films, had his status revoked briefly, too. Ahimsa is a US citizen. He was arrested in India after he criticised a ban on Muslim students wearing the hijab in schools in the southern state of Karnataka. In court, the government said India could expel people who were “undesirable” and foreigners did not have the right to free speech in India. The court stayed the cancellation.
More famously, in 2019, the USA-based writer Aatish Taseer, whose mother is the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and whose father is the slain Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, had his overseas citizenship cancelled after he wrote a cover story in Time magazine asking if India could survive another five years of Modi.
In Taseer’s case, the government claimed his status was revoked because he had “concealed” the fact that his father was a Pakistani national. Earlier, in 2014, Christine Mehta, a researcher at Amnesty International, had her OCI revoked after she studied India’s human rights record in Jammu and Kashmir.
A gigantic conspiracy?
A web-based portal called Disinfo Lab has, according to a report in The Washington Post, been compiling information of critics overseas, Indian or not, and blaming them for undermining India. The portal establishes links between the critics and the philanthropic billionaire George Soros, sometimes by connecting disconnected dots, to present an image of a gigantic conspiracy.
At the same time, foreign-based web portals critical of India are being taken offline inside the country. The latest to suffer such erasure is Hindutva Watch, which compiled human rights violations by Hindu fundamentalists. India has escalated demands on X, formerly Twitter, and many accounts critical of the government have been “withheld” recently, including those operated by foreigners who live abroad. X has complied, but issued a statement expressing disapproval of the government’s action. Clearly, X’s owner Elon Musk, who claims to champion free speech, has a different standard for different countries, and in the Indian case, he has meekly complied with many requests.
Academics are also being turned away. Within weeks of Modi’s election in 2014, Penny Vera-Sanso, of Birkbeck University in London, who had been visiting India since 1990 and writes about gender, was denied entry. In 2022, Lindsay Bremner, who teaches architecture at the University of Westminster, had a valid research visa when she arrived in India, but was told at the airport that she could not enter. Earlier that year, Flippo Osella, who teaches anthropology at the University of Sussex, was sent back. He is an expert on Kerala and has been visiting India for 30 years. The government claimed his research on caste was deemed “sensitive”. Osella understands Malayalam and has studied the Ezhava community. He has written about Mamootty, a popular actor in Kerala, and was working with local institutions on predicting weather. His research was supported by the UK government, but he was treated brusquely and not allowed to contact friends in India.
India has also barred writers and academics who have tourist visas but who might conduct research, which would technically violate Indian rules. In 2018, Kathryn Hummel, an Australian poet, was turned away at Bangalore airport and Pakistani researcher Annie Zaman was similarly sent back and prevented from attending a conference in Delhi. When I sought out some of the academics denied entry, none of them wanted to speak, on or off the record, because they did not wish to jeopardise their visas in the future. Some American journalists, Indian origin or otherwise, too have had visa requests delayed or denied.
When graduate students and academics at several US universities organised a three-day conference in 2021 called Dismantling Global Hindutva, which examined the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and its effects on Indian society, several academics and potential speakers were warned off from participating, and a few backed out, so as not to jeopardise future visits to India. Indian residents in the USA who support the Indian government wrote to faculty heads and university administrators complaining against those academics. Academics in the USA who are of Indian origin and are critical of India have frequently been targeted by concerted efforts from pro-government overseas Indians, calling for their dismissal or for them to be disciplined.
Several journalists and human rights activists living in India find themselves mired in legal cases, which means they must have clearance from courts or other appropriate authorities before leaving the country. This has prevented several writers and human rights activists from participating at events overseas.
Others with clean records also find that they are suspect. Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a Kashmiri photojournalist whose photographs earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, was prevented from leaving for Paris to launch a book featuring her work, even though she had a valid French visa.
India is erecting a barrier between scholars and their subjects, reporters and their stories, and closing off doors and windows, narrowing Indian minds and hardening outlooks.
And it flexes its muscles abroad, shouting at critics, preventing their travel and access, and – if the Canadian and US accusations are true – attempting to eliminate those it disagrees with.
But it will hold elections in a few months, and encomiums praising the world’s largest democracy will follow. Naturally.